Laura Kinsale (20 page)

It was the end of March when Zenia sat with Marianne in the back parlor, pouring water on a forced pot of bright yellow daffodils. She set the watering can on the floor, bending awkwardly over her increasing bulk.

The door opened. Her father came in. “Zenia,” he said grimly, “You must come downstairs, my dear. You have a caller.”

The expression on his face made Zenia’s heart freeze. Marianne stood up. “Who is it, Michael?”
 

“It is the Earl Belmaine.”

“Oh dear,” Marianne said. “Would you like me to come?”

Zenia rose. She looked at them both anxiously.
 

“Who is the Earl Belmaine?” she asked in a timid voice.

Her father smiled at her, a sudden sweet warmth. “Ah, if he had only heard you ask,” he said. “It might shake his sense of himself a little. He is Lord Winter’s father, my dear. You need not be afraid of him. I’ll stay with you, and Marianne will come if you like.”

Zenia glanced at Marianne, who had been having a difficult week. “No. You must not come downstairs. If Papa will go with me...”

“I’ll be there,” her father said, holding open the door.

In her father’s study a tall man waited, an elegant form standing beside the open drapes, the winter sun lighting a curve of cheek and brow that gave Zenia a start of memory, a resemblance that knocked all her desperately gathered poise into confusion. She stood before the door, lost.

He gazed at her for a long, hard moment, long enough for her to see that he was prouder than his son, his eyes blue but colder, his skin pale and his carriage unyieldingly erect, the black hair dimmed with silver. He looked directly at her waistline without embarrassment, with a frigid gravity, and then up into her face.

“I wish to speak to her alone,” he said.

“My daughter has asked that I remain with her,” her father said. “Zenobia, this is Lord Belmaine. Belmaine—my daughter.”

“Lady Winter,” the earl said caustically. “Or so I am informed.”

“Allow me to make one thing entirely clear.” Her father spoke in a soft and dangerous voice, one Zenia had never yet heard him use before. “I will not tolerate any rudeness or insinuation regarding my daughter in my house. She lives with me. She has made no claims on you.” He held a chair for Zenia, placing it near the fire. “It is you, sir, who chose to call on her.”

Zenia sat down, supporting herself on the arms of the chair. The earl’s nostrils flared a little. He looked at her as if he would eat her—angrily, almost hungrily.

“Well,” he said to Zenia. “Do you have marriage lines? A record? Witnesses?”

“No,” she said.

He made a sharp turn and stood looking at a candle sconce on the wall, his hands locked behind his back. “No,” he muttered. “Just ‘no’!” He stared at the sconce. “You used my son’s name.”

Zenia said nothing, ashamed of her subterfuge. It had been lies, though she had not told them herself.

“Did you see him die?” Lord Belmaine asked the wall sconce.

“No. He put me up onto a camel with an Egyptian officer, and went for his rifle, and I did not see him again, because the Egyptian took me ahead.”

The earl’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me the name of this—this horse he was to obtain.”

“The String of Pearls.”

“And what name he used in disguise?”

“Abu Haj Hasan, the Moor.”

“And what place they arrested him?”

“Hayil, in the Nejd.”

Lord Belmaine turned. “You were with him, then. You are this absurd Queen of the English. I’ve made inquiries; I’ve had letters from the consuls in Beyrout and Cairo. Every court from here to Calcutta is buzzing with it; Hester Stanhope’s bastard, living as a filthy Bedouin in some tent!” He glanced at her father. “Hester Stanhope’s—and yours.”

“My
daughter,
Belmaine. Under my protection.”

“I have no interest in your daughter, Bruce, unless she’s carrying my son’s child! And if she is—then she’s under
my
protection. I’ve waited. I’ve thought an adventuress would come wheedling to me. I’ve had this house watched. For months I’ve waited. My son! My son is dead, and I’ve waited. But you aren’t going to come, are you? You’re not going to ask for money. Is it not his?” He swung away and sat down, his voice shaking. “Is this just a game to drive me mad?”

Zenia looked at the top of his bent head. She said, “Perhaps you will not believe the truth.”

He looked up.

“I was with Lord Winter,” she said coldly. “One night, when we both knew we were to be put to death at dawn. I have never been with another. He is the father of my child.”

My child.
It was the first time she had thought of it so. Hers alone. She sensed that this man wanted it, and a wave of ferocious possessiveness welled up in her. She had to lock her hands on the chair to keep from hugging her arms about her and holding the baby inside her to herself.

“I have no proof,” she said, before he could ask. “I have no proof of anything. But I do not deny you the truth, because Lord Winter was your son.”

He stared into her eyes for a long moment, his own that same familiar hue, but different. Paler.

He stood up suddenly. “You have no marriage lines,” he said in a sharp voice. “They have been lost.” He looked up at her father. “Do you understand me, Bruce? They have been lost in the desert. I myself feel that they will be recovered. I will make every effort to recover them. I will use all the resources at my command to see that they are found. Do you understand?”

Her father put his hand on her shoulder. He squeezed. “Zenia?”

She opened her mouth to say that there were no marriage lines to be recovered—but Lord Belmaine was frowning at her with his jaw set, scowling at her deeply.

“Madam,” he said. “Do not speak. I admire scruple. I admire honesty. But before you speak, I lay before you the question of the higher principle at stake. You of anyone must know what it is to be a bastard. You have it in your power to give your child his father’s name, his rightful name and place—or withhold it from him.” He stood stiffly, his hands behind his back. “Madam—Lady Winter—I do not want you to lie to me. I believe that you married my son, and you have lost your marriage lines, and they will be restored in good order. I believe this. I will act on this belief. I ask of you only that, for the sake of your child, for the sake of his future—please—do not speak unwisely.”

My child.
She thought of her mother, of her own life, of shame and defenselessness. She turned her head and looked up at her father. He watched her soberly, a mirror of the miniature painting she had dreamed upon all her days. He had said she could stay as long as she wished. But the future was coming, relentlessly.

My child.
With no name, as she had had none. With no father.

“No,” she whispered. “I would not speak unwisely.”

The baby was born at Swanmere, in a gilt and green room that smelled of age, with a doctor and two midwives hovering about, and Lady Belmaine standing beside the bed like a stately statue as Zenia sweated and panted and felt her body torn asunder. All through it, she kept opening her eyes and seeing Lady Belmaine, upright and grave, her hair smooth as dove’s wings, her high cheekbones white as linen, her fine mouth unsmiling.

Zenia did not scream, though they told her that she should. She did not moan. She was Bedu, el-Nasr, Selim. She had crossed the red sands. She would not let Lady Belmaine see her break.

There was a surge of agony and then a flutter of exclamations: commands and advice that she could not hear. All she could hear was,
Don’t cry, damn you;
all she could see was Lady Belmaine; all she could feel was pain.

“It is a girl,” someone said from somewhere.

And in the silence Zenia heard it begin to cough and wail.

“Congratulations,” one of the doctors said heartily. “A fine healthy babe. Good color; excellent lungs.”

Lady Belmaine’s mouth pursed. She looked down at Zenia, a brief impatient look that skidded over her face and down to her clenched hands. “I will tell Belmaine,” she said, turning away.

CHAPTER TWELVE

London, December 1841

The calling card lay on the hall table, waiting for the master of the house when he came in. Michael Bruce glanced at it as he returned from his monthly dinner at Lincoln’s Inn—and stopped dead in the hallway. He pulled off his glove and picked up the card.

In small copperplate print on exquisitely thin pasteboard, the name was
Arden Mansfield, Viscount Winter.
And jotted in the corner in firm black ink:
Travellers’ Club or Clarendon Hotel.

Michael Bruce shook his head. For a long moment he closed his eyes and shook his head back and forth, a half-laugh of horror choked in his throat. “Good God. Oh, great God. I am too old for this,” he muttered, and turned toward the stair. “Marianne!” he shouted, and went up them two at a time.

Mr. Michael Bruce had not lived an entire lifetime in quiet peace in Marylebone. In his youth he had traveled the Continent at the height of Napoleon’s power, he had witnessed the bombardment of Copenhagen at twenty and prowled behind enemy lines in the Peninsular battlefields at twenty-one. At twenty-two, he had lived with and loved a baffling, sensual, haughty, extraordinary woman eleven years older than himself, had sheltered her in his arms on a wave-dashed rock while their ship went down off Cyprus, followed her into Eastern palaces and smoked with pashas and princes straight out of the Arabian Nights, waited shoulder to shoulder with her in the desert, their pistols cocked and ready for Bedouin assault. He had been belittled and adored by her in the same sentence, had given way to her ego, walked in her shadow, implored her to marry him long after he had known it would be the greatest disaster of his life if she did. He had left her on the shores of the Lebanon because she screamed at him that he must go. He had traveled with the memory of her tear-stained face, and in Constantinople he had found a sweet, quiet girl to idolize him—the first in a series of affairs that took him home across France; because when he was young, women fell in love with him as easily as breathing, and he could never say no to them.